My Eschatology

The earliest Christians did not have a concept of the immortal soul. Originally there was no "Christian" concept of an afterlife in some other reality beyond our own. Instead, there was the expectation of the resurrection. If one follows the history of Judaism, it is quite possible to trace an evolution of their ideas for what followed death. The advent of the Law in Hebrew culture brought with it the idea that God should, or must, reward the righteous and punish the evil. God became a Just God, and justice for his people was expected. Then over the course of time, his people came to the realization that things rarely followed this scheme.

Resurrection seems to have arisen as an answer to the question, 'If the righteous die, and the evil receive the worldly rewards, then why be just?' Especially in the shadow of Babylonian captivity, and Graeco-Roman rule this question burned all the more. Over the course of hundreds of years, there was a growing preference for the idea that the righteous dead would be raised up by God. As the world would be given to them then, this eschatological world would be a just (and therefore perfect) world. By Jesus' time, the idea seems to have caught on with the 'lower' strata of society. But, then we hear that the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection. Jesus argues that this is because they don't understand the Scriptures, and since we all follow Jesus this must be true . . . but it's not. The Sadducees who had all the comforts of Graeco-Roman culture, had no need for a future day of justice. They were getting by perfectly fine as it was. They were actually staying truer to traditional Jewish thought than the Pharisees or Essenes. Obviously on both sides, pro- or anti-resurrection, there were ulterior motives for believing as such.

A vastly important point is that there is practically no evidence that Semitic cultures had any room for an eternal soul. All ideas of heaven and hell are imposed on Judeo-Christian thought from Greek thought. Even in John, which is vastly influenced by Greek culture, Jesus does not go to Heaven in his ascension, but only "to be with the father". According to Paul it is not his soul that was raised, but his glorified body, which was accordingly designed for this world, not heaven. In other words, Jesus has gone to be with God for this interim period of history while we expect him, body and all, to come back with God for the coming eschatological age.

There is a lot more that could be said about this, but let's fast-forward to today. In the age of impending nuclear war, the idea that God is patiently waiting to come back and restore the world to the righteous seems in many ways to have lost its appeal, and for many including myself, any prospect of validity. There are narrow parameters in which I believe we can still speak of a resurrection (meaning I don't deny that Jesus was "raised"), but to do so requires semantic/conceptual contortions that I don't plan to go into in this post.

But what of the 'soul'? My basic position is that there is nothing eternal about us. I am currently taking two neuroscience classes, which have both pointed out that all the things that make us "human" are products of neurological structure. I don't deny that there is a gestalt quality to people which marks a unity we can call a soul. I just don't believe that this is eternal. In adapting itself to Greek concepts and Greek cosmology, Christianity has subsumed this idea into its faith. But, it seems that it is neither original to Christianity, nor necessary.

I find this to be an important point since Christianity has long obsessed over its mission to "save souls". In this regard it seems that the majority of modern Christians are consumed with proselytizing people to an overtly Greek manner of thinking, which essentially has nothing (!) to do with Christian faith.

We have become so consumed by this syncretized form of Christian religion that we have ceased to remember that it is a religion that is whole-heartedly concerned with justice - not soul-saving.













I'll close by saying what I have personally come to believe. I have grown up as a Christian, and we are all sympathetic to the culture we grow up in. Yet, my worldview is far more scientific: I order my reality by science. Thus, my faith is shaped creatively by this tension between the way I perceive reality (science), and the ideals I hope for (God as I experience through Christian faith). I have found that Christianity does not validate the soul, and science flatly denies it. Christianity does concern itself with an eternal God, and that God's implications for justice and human dignity. Science frequently denies this God, but does not do so unilaterally, and is incapable of disproof. Science has forced us to alter the language we use to speak of God, as well as God's role in the causality of our universe.

I believe that humans have no hope for eternity outside of God. But, this theocentric hope is actually original to Judeo-Christian faith. Before Greek thought made a mess of it, Christianity agreed that God alone was eternal, and that our hope was in him as evidenced by the "resurrection" of Jesus. Jesus, the prototype of righteousness, was not lost to death. His life did not end in meaninglessness, but was validated as God raised him, which is a poor way of saying that he joined into God's eternity. However different my worldview is from Jesus' first followers, my hope is the same: that in/by the mysterious Eternal, I am remembered.

Lent, Round Two

It's Lent again, which reminds me that a year has passed. My inaugural Lent experience was one year ago. I didn't participate, really. I just hung out and observed. Somewhere there's a digital archive holding the blog of my experience, which concluded with my hope that in the coming year I would be more inclined to join in.

Sad though it may be, I felt less inclined this year than last. It's slightly pathetic. There are a few reasons why I resist partaking in Lent. One is that I hate the idea of fostering a sense of depression just to make the joy of Easter more abundant. Today has enough troubles as it is, why drive myself to despair with self-inflicted difficulties?

The greater reason though, is that over the last year my level of spirituality has plummeted to new lows. I say this not so much as a lament, but more as an honest statement of fact. I could proceed to list my reasons, whether to repent or justify myself, but I'll refrain. Basically, in this season of my life (hooray for seasons), I find most spiritual disciplines annoying. Lent included. I guess I'm at a point where I question all the ideas of being "closer" to God due to any actions I would take. Right now I feel God to be more mysterious, and honestly, more distant/unknowable than ever before.

Still, in spite of my reluctance, I am a sucker for peer pressure. When everyone at church started talking about it, I felt like I should join in regardless of my misgivings. There's also the small fact that my girlfriend took up the Lenten discipline of reading the Bible daily. This is her first time to ever read it. She's already finished Mark, and has started on Genesis. When she first informed me of her plans, the repressed evangelical in my head began tearing his robes with guilt. And how did I atone for my shortcomings?

I decided to make a point to attempt to work out three times a week.
. . .Thus far I've managed to make it to the gym about 5 times, which puts me about 7 workouts behind schedule. This is the point where I could concede defeat, and reinforce my anti-liturgical tendencies by feeling guilty. Instead of that, it seems proper to wrap this up by stating what I'm learning:

First, it seems that lack of discipline in life-in-general precludes any chance of benefiting from specific spiritual disciplines. I haven't made it to the gym because I haven't managed to be efficient with school, and therefore I'm always playing catch-up with the time I would otherwise dedicate to everything from working out to praying.

Second, and most importantly, Easter is merely the extension of Lent. The problem we get ourselves into is thinking that Jesus' selflessness in his march toward the cross was something he conceded to do reluctantly. I don't get the idea Jesus was particularly excited about the prospect of dying by torture, but it seems that he was so compelled in his way in life that the threat of death was something he merely disregarded.

In other words, the joy of Easter is only an extension of the joy of Lent. Jesus' life, even in the shadow of his death, was not characterized by a bitter, muttering consent for the trials he would endure. It was an joyful extension of his faith in a loving God, even in the shadow of a cross. That same joy is continuous through his death into his resurrection. If Lent is depressing to us, then I hardly find it believable that Easter will manage to cheer us up. Our attitudes toward the trials of Lent extend into the dawn of Easter.

Thus, my difficulties in finding any enthusiasm for this time of the year can be traced back to the fact that it seems whether I add something for Lent, or take something away, it seems that life will be characterized by more of the same. Easter then is mediocre at best, and Lent a sequence of drudgery that precedes it. Obviously, it doesn't have to be that way. Realizations are seeds of change for the days to come. So, maybe, hopefully, Lenten realizations can transform heavy obligations into ways of rest.

Footnotes to Myself

I'm in the process of trying to whittle down my "unread" bookcase. Around a year ago I divided up my books in an attempt to curb my gross consumerism. Books are my weakness. Used to be, I couldn't walk into Half-Price without leaving with about 10 books that I was going to read "one of these days . . ." The problem was that I was collecting a library of fancy books, and realizing that I had read precious few of them. I felt like I was guilty of false advertising, even if only to myself; saying "look at what a scholar I am", when in reality I was merely a masking my own ignorance.

I started out with a black and white dictum, that in order to be placed in the "read" bookcase, I must have read 90% of the book and understood it. This has evolved slowly. Now I am at the point where I simply have to get the gist, and if I haven't actually read much of it, I have to be able to tell you why I chose to count the book as being behind me.

There's a long tangential intro for you.

I guess I've grown tired of intensely perusing every book I read. It seems lately most of them only get one to two chapters worth of my attention before I realize that I don't really care enough to finish. Perhaps life is too short.

C.S. Lewis was my latest short-lived endeavor. He managed 12 pages of my attention before finding himself placed beside his other "read" works. On a certain level, I've grown weary of attempting to read books that don't speak to my world. There was a point, which doesn't really seem to be very distant, when I tried to listen to books in view of their own time and place. Certainly that was a beneficial exercise. Now, though, I'm ready to read people who have something applicable to say to exactly where I'm at, wherever that may be. Lewis' ideas seemed very Modern, and thus, when I hear them from my own situation, rather silly.

Whatever essay I was reading spent a lot of time defending the existence of the 'human soul and its immortality'. From a scientific and theological standpoint this is something I've completely ceased to believe in. I don't think there is anything immortal about us. Yet, I've started to realize that this is purely a matter of opinion, and it's basically an opinion that doesn't make much of a difference in anything. Lewis and countless other voices on my shelves, blather on adamantly defending their opinion as the only one which is viable . . . meanwhile the world-at-large seems to have completely ceased to care.

The majority of kids in my chemistry class, or people at my work, or people I pass on the street prove with their actions that they consider such thoughts to be total minutia. These thoughts may be interesting, like ancient history if told well can be interesting. They may even be important to explaining how we got where we are, but that's where their relevance stops and life's other, more pressing, difficulties begin.

I've got plenty of opinions, and I enjoy sharing them; even defending them. I feel I've spent most of my adult life forming my opinions and seeking to justify them over and against what I formerly thought was the truth. Now, I've got a bookcase glutted with endless footnotes on how I achieved my current state of opinion. If it seemed useful I could write one hell of a paper justifying my position on everything.

But no one appears to be asking me to justify myself. I, like most, live day to day in an anonymous sea of faces that hurry from one location to another, too busy to consider anything but how to finish all the items on their latest itinerary. All are quite content to let me stand still, endlessly justifying my own position so long as it doesn't interfere with their own to-do list. They ask me no questions, only pleading that I not slow them down.

The only question I really face is my own:
With all my volumes of facts informing my beliefs, how then should I live?

It's a long road to humility, and in the end we cover no distance at all.